Sanhedrin Nursery – Garden Blog

• Spring vegetables can be planted now from nursery starts. Begin your garden with broccoli, cabbage, lettuce, spinach, chard and onions. It pays to grow your own!

• Potatoes can be planted this month. Plant red, white, yellow, blue and russet for a variety of uses and flavors.

• Raspberry, blackberry, loganberry, and boysenberry vines should be planted now for delicious, home-grown berries.

• Prune wisteria trees and vines by cutting out unwanted long runners and removing old seed pods. Don’t damage flower buds that are clustered at the end of short branches.

• Fruit trees are still available as bare-root trees, but only for a short while longer. Start your orchard now!

The Spring Vegetable Garden

A few lovely, warm spring days finally give us the chance to get outside and enjoy the sunshine. And what better way to enjoy it than to set out some spring vegetable plants in your garden or raised beds. The warm days and chilly nights that we get this time of year are perfect for many delicious vegetables.

You can now set out seedlings of broccoli, cabbage, cauliflower, spinach, onions, chard, sugar snap peas and lettuce. From seed you can start beets, carrots, Swiss chard, lettuce, peas and spinach.

Cabbage and broccoli are members of the cole family. “Cole” is the Old English word for cabbage and is the name given to a group of vegetables that share a common ancestry and a family preference for cool weather. Other garden relatives include cauliflower, Brussels sprouts, kale, kohlrabi, collards, turnips, radishes, bok choy and baby bok choy.

Seeing these plants side by side, you might find it hard to see what cabbages have in common with kohlrabi or broccoli. But the diverse appearance of cole family members comes from a single remarkable family trait — the ability to thicken various plant parts. Thus the kohlrabi has thickened stems; broccoli has thickened immature flowering branches; turnips and radishes have thickened roots; and with cabbage, the thickening forms the heads.

Lettuce also needs cool weather to be at its best. There are many different kinds of lettuce: looseleaf has tender, delicate, and mildly flavoured leaves; butterheads, also called Boston or buttercrunch, form loose heads; romaine, also called cos, grows in a long head of sturdy leaves and crispheads, also called iceberg, forms tight, dense heads. Leaves come in various shades of red and green. You can set out plants and plant seeds at the same time to have successive crops this spring.

Root crops grow well in the spring also. Carrots are easy to start in the cool, spring weather. Carrot seeds are tiny and germinate best in damp soil when the soil temperature is between 50 and 60 degrees. Beets, onions, radishes and turnips all grow very rapidly in the spring.

Peas are perhaps the most popular spring vegetable. There’s nothing quite so sweet and delicious as fresh garden peas. Dwarf varieties grow 18 to 24 inches tall and stand best with some support. The tall varieties grow 6 to 8 feet high and need poles or string, or wire trellises to climb. You can grow shelling peas or edible-pod varieties, also known as sugar peas, or the flat edible-pod varieties known as snow peas, popular in Asian cooking.

Take advantage of this nice spring weather and start your vegetable garden producing now.

This entry was posted on Friday, March 10th, 2017 at 3:27 pm and is filed under Garden Article, Willits. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.